Aangetekend Mailen and BIT: a match in security and reliability | Aangetekend Mailen

The innovative service of Aangetekend Mailen was launched in 2011 with the mission to replace a significant part of the physical mail process for digital processes in small and large businesses. Continuity and security are essential for such a service. That is why Aangetekend Mailen chose BIT as their ISO 27001 certified hosting provider.

Cheaper than a stamp, more certain than registeredIn the eyes of the two founders of the company, paper post is not of this time anymore. One of them, Philip Voogt, explains: ‘Regular mail is expensive, inefficient and error prone. With our solution, organisations can send documents cheaper than a stamp and with more certainty than registered post. As an independent third party, we register who, what, when and with whom correspondence has occurred. Mail sent through Aangetekend Mailen is thereby proven and valid. The standard mailing process can never comply.’

Early with ISO 27001It goes without saying that security is extremely important for RM. Co-founder Wouter van den Brink explains: ‘To be able to offer our clients legal certainty, we can only work with an ISO 27001 certified data center. A data center that is in the Netherlands too, since American companies always fall under the Patriot Act. That is the main reason why we came to BIT in 2013: at the time that we were looking for a hosting party, they were one of the very few providers that already had an ISO 27001 certification.

Resource pool for dedicated mail serversAangetekend Mailen, a young company in a new market, is still developing and looking for partners to support their business. Philip Voogt says: ‘We are looking for the best parties to help us do what we want to do, in the best possible way. One not only needs to be good in what one does, but also know not to do what one cannot do. BIT fits this image.’ Wouter van den Brink adds: ‘What I like about BIT, is their proactive input. They ask us where we want to go, what our plans are, and then they find the best way to accommodate those wishes.

One example: for security reasons, we set up a private virtual mail server for every client so we are able to fully protect their environment. But that works a little differently with two or ten mail servers than, like we have right now, a multiple thereof. That is why BIT is now working on a resource pool, manageable through a portal, from which we can create virtual machines ourselves. With such a resource pool we can also make more efficient use of the capacity that we rent – clients using little memory or bandwidth fall short of our large-scale consumers.

Continuity through redundancy and backupsIt is obviously important for clients of Aangetekend Mailen that the service is always available. Therefore, together with BIT, the company has taken the necessary precautions. Wouter van den Brink: ‘Redundancy is part of ISO 27001, so that was a given with BIT. In addition to that, we have optimised the backup plan too. Every VM has its own backup, which is encrypted and saved in another location through a backup server. The machines are set up in accordance with a golden image, which means that we could have a machine that fails up and running again in 10 minutes. The client does not even have to notice.’

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We realise that the IT infrastructure is essential to our clients and that is why we set the bar high. Those who want to do their job without worry, need to be able to rely on their partners. For many of our clients, we are not a supplier, but an extension of their organisation.